The feature image taken just west of Goulburn shows the sun late afternoon looking west. Goulburn and Canberra is on the edge of the dome of heat that has engulfed much of inland southern Australia over recent days.
The haze is likely to be from distant fires burning across Victoria.
On Monday, there was a clear boundary lying through Goulburn. Areas further west is clearly engulfed in heat while if I turned around to face the east, a low lying cloud cover was visible on the horizon.
The coastal strip of New South Wales was under the influence of a cooler change with low stratus or stratocumulus cloud dominating. Facing west, there was no cloud. The air dried out sharply as due points fell.
During Saturday, the dome of heat entered western Victoria where temperatures soared to 40C to 41C. Further to this, a major fire burning near Gellibrand (Southwest Victoria) broke through containment lines and was burning out of control.
During Sunday the heat had traversed across New South Wales and even reached Western Sydney in which maximum temperatures soared to 40C to 41C again. However, this was limited to areas west of Parramatta. As such, only areas around Blacktown, Camden Penrith and Richmond would have experienced this. It was much cooler along the coast.
Across Victoria, the heat was limited mostly to northern areas where temperatures of over 40C were commonplace again.
The Mallee and Wimmera regions and northeast regions (Low lying areas) experienced maximum temperatures topping 42C for the day.
The highest maximum temperatures of Sunday across New South Wales occurred within the Hay and Ivanhoe regions where 46C and 45.8C occurred.
During Monday some incredible high temperatures occurred across parts of South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales including:
South Australia
- Adelaide (Parafield Airport) - 44.9C.
- Ceduna - 49.3C (At 10.30 am here, it had reached 41C and by 2.30 pm, it had reached 47.9C topping at 49.3C at 4.30 pm. A cooler wind change at 6.34 pm brought relief).
- Port Augusta - 47.4C.
- Maree - 46.4C.
Victoria
- Mildura - 44.5C.
- Walpeup - 43.5C.
New South Wales
- Ivanhoe - 47.2C.
- Dubbo (Airport) - 45.1C at 5 pm.
- Hay - 43.9C.
Generally, any town and city west of the Great Dividing Range and across the lower elevations easily reached 40C for a second day in a row.
I stood on the very edge of this west of Goulburn and could see what was occurring further west and at lower elevations.
This is compounded by lack of rain, drought and little grass cover. While rain has fallen in Sydney over recent weeks, there are numerous towns and cities where the monthly rainfall to date is 0 mm to barely 5 mm such as Albury and Wagga Wagga where 2 mm has fallen to date for 2026.
The heat is expected to continue until it is broken up by a cooler change Friday to Sunday.